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Submission + - GoPro to start making drones (robohub.org)

Submitted by Hallie Siegel
Hallie Siegel writes: GoPro is to start making its own line of drones and have them ready for release as early as Christmas 2015. Early indications of price point range from $500 to $1,000 for the first model.

Submission + - Nanny State Bans Many Porn Acts in UK

Submitted by DigitAl56K
DigitAl56K writes: The Independent reports that the UK's Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 has banned a long list of sex acts from Video-On-Demand pornography produced in the UK, many with no obvious reason. The restrictions "appear to make no distinction between consensual and non-consensual practices between adults".

A list of banned acts can be found in TFA, and include use of physical restraints, spanking, and humiliation. I wonder how long it will be before sites hosting content featuring such terrible, heinous, immoral acts are permanently blocked by the UK's net filter.

Submission + - Aliens Are Probably Everywhere, Just Not Anywhere Near Humans

Submitted by rossgneumann
rossgneumann writes: If there’s intelligent life in the cosmos, it’s probably nowhere we can get to anytime soon. At least that’s the finding of the astrobiologist who, for the first time in decades, has rendered a major update to the key formula scientists use to seek out interstellar life. That’d be the Drake equation, which was developed over half a century ago to determine where life might lurk in the universe. Using the new Kepler data, astrobiologist Amri Wandel did some calculations to estimate the density of life-bearing worlds in our corner of the universe.

Submission + - Intelligence agency wants a superconducting, super cool, supercomputer (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: If there’s a away to overcome the power and cooling requirements to build a supercomputer beyond exaflop – that’s over 1,000 petaflops, about 30 times faster than the current fastest supercomputer — researchers at Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) want to find it.

Submission + - Ocean-going robot fleet completes fish tracking mission (robohub.org)

Submitted by Hallie Siegel
Hallie Siegel writes: The second phase of an ambitious project to gather valuable information on ocean processes and marine life using a fleet of innovative marine robots has just reached its conclusion. Co-ordinated by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), the Exploring Ocean Fronts project took place off southwest England and saw the largest deployment of robotic vehicles ever attempted in UK water. The marine robot patrols successfully located tagged fish and tracked the movements of individual fish over several days by re-locating them.

Submission + - New effort to grant legal rights to chimpanzees fails (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Advocates of “legal personhood” to chimpanzees have lost another battle. This morning, a New York appellate court rejected a lawsuit by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to free a chimp named Tommy from captivity. The group had argued that the chimpanzee deserved the human right of bodily liberty. Despite the loss, the NhRP is pursuing more cases in the hopes of conferring legal rights to a variety of animals, from elephants to dolphins.

Submission + - We Are Living in the Surveillance Society Says Assange

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Julian Assange writes in an op-ed in the NYT that we are living in a surveillance society where totalitarian surveillance is embodied in our governments and embedded in our economy, in our mundane uses of technology and in our everyday interactions. Companies like Google and Facebook are in the same business as the U.S. government’s National Security Agency says Assange and their business model is the industrial destruction of privacy. This destruction of privacy widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling factions and everyone else, leaving “the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes,” as Orwell wrote, “still more hopeless.”

According to Assange, the very concept of the Internet — a single, global, homogenous network that enmeshes the world — is the essence of a surveillance state. "The Internet was built in a surveillance-friendly way because governments and serious players in the commercial Internet wanted it that way. There were alternatives at every step of the way. They were ignored." But if there is a “democratic weapon,” that “gives claws to the weak” in George Orwell's words, it is cryptography. "It is cheap to produce: cryptographic software can be written on a home computer. It is even cheaper to spread: software can be copied in a way that physical objects cannot. But it is also insuperable — the mathematics at the heart of modern cryptography are sound, and can withstand the might of a superpower." It is too early to say whether the “democratizing” or the “tyrannical” side of the Internet will eventually win out says Assange. "But acknowledging them — and perceiving them as the field of struggle — is the first step toward acting effectively."

Submission + - Ultrasound used to create Haptics, that can be touched and felt

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Bristol University use ultrasound focused to create 3d objects out of the thin air. The research, led by Dr Ben Long and colleagues Professor Sriram Subramanian, Sue Ann Seah and Tom Carter from the University of Bristol’s Department of Computer Science, could change the way 3D shapes are used. The new technology could enable surgeons to explore a CT scan by enabling them to feel a disease, such as a tumour, using haptic feedback. The method uses ultrasound, which is focussed onto hands above the device and that can be felt. By focussing complex patterns of ultrasound, the air disturbances can be seen as floating 3D shapes. Visually, the researchers have demonstrated the ultrasound patterns by directing the device at a thin layer of oil so that the depressions in the surface can be seen as spots when lit by a lamp. “In the future, people could feel holograms of objects that would not otherwise be touchable, such as feeling the differences between materials in a CT scan or understanding the shapes of artefacts in a museum.”

Submission + - SpoofedMe - Social Login Attack Discovered by IBM X-Force Researchers (securityintelligence.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IBM X-Force’s Application Security Research Team has devised a logical attack that allows a malicious user to intrude into user accounts on a relying website — a website that relies on authentication assertions passed to it by the identity provider — by abusing the social login mechanism.

A specific instance of this attack allowed an attacker to intrude into a Slashdot user account by using the “Sign In With LinkedIn” service. It should be noted that LinkedIn responded quickly and fixed this vulnerability after the attack was disclosed. Once logged in, the attacker has complete access to the victim’s account. For example, the attacker could access the victim’s private information and impersonate him or her

Submission + - Every weapon, armored truck, and plane the Pentagon gave to local police (muckrock.com)

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: You may have heard that the image-conscious Los Angeles Unified School District chose to return the grenade launchers it received from the Defense Department’s surplus equipment program. You probably have not heard about some of the more obscure beneficiaries of the Pentagon giveaway, but now you can after MuckRock got the Department of Defense to release the full database, letting anyone browse what gear their local department has received.

Submission + - A Cheap, Durable Robot Hand With An Adaptable Grip

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Building robot hands that mimic human ones may not be doing robotic grasping any favors. Authors from iRobot, Harvard and Yale describe the success they've had with an underactuated, three fingered hand. It doesn't look human, but thanks to a design that prioritizes flexibility and adaptability, it can do a lot of the same jobs with a lot less programming than previous models. http://spectrum.ieee.org/robot...

Submission + - Census.gov - Young Adults - Then And Now (census.gov)

Submitted by teha2
teha2 writes: Do more young adults today in your area live with their parents than in previous decades? Do more own their own homes? This edition looks at multiple characteristics of the population age 18-34 in 1980, 1990, 2000 and today (using 2013 American Community Survey 5-year data). Zoom in to see tract, county, metro, state and national-level data.

Submission + - docompo - Virtual Data Teaches You Sexy Expressions -- Our Crew Head Into The Op (livejournal.com)

Submitted by vegagyuf
vegagyuf writes: This search tool can easily scan the text within images because of the OCR feature, which their Elastic Computer Cloud in 2006, well before anyone else did. null Instant Messaging IM Instant message and IMing are two another table, thus establishing a relationship between the two tables. This

Submission + - Consumer-grade SSDs survive two petabytes of writes

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: The SSD Endurance Experiment previously covered on Slashdot has reached another big milestone: two freaking petabytes of writes. That's an astounding total for consumer-grade drives rated to survive no more than a few hundred terabytes. Only two of the initial six subjects made it to 2PB. The Kingston HyperX 3K, Intel 335 Series, and Samsung 840 Series expired on the road to 1PB, while the Corsair Neutron GTX faltered at 1.2PB. The Samsung 840 Pro continues despite logging thousands of reallocated sectors. It has remained completely error-free throughout the experiment, unlike a second HyperX, which has suffered a couple of uncorrectable errors. The second HyperX is mostly intact otherwise, though its built-in compression tech has reduced the 2PB of host writes to just 1.4PB of flash writes. Even accounting for compression, the flash in the second HyperX has proven to be far more robust than in the first. That difference highlights the impact normal manufacturing variances can have on flash wear. It also illustrates why the experiment's sample size is too small to draw definitive conclusions about the durability of specific models. However, the fact that all the drives far exceeded their endurance specifications bodes well for the endurance of consumer-grade SSDs in general.

Submission + - Microsoft, B&N dissolve Nook marriage for $62 million (blogspot.com)

Submitted by taha007
taha007 writes: The joint venture between Microsoft and Barnes & Noble to revive the ailing Nook Media business has gone awry.

The companies announced via a regulatory filing on Thursday that Nook Media — the corporation jointly owned by Microsoft and B&N — has agreed to buy out the Windows maker's shares for $62.4 million in cash and 2.7 million shares of B&N common stock. In addition, all ties between the companies in Nook Media, including contractual obligations, commercial agreements, and international content acquisition, have been revoked.

Microsoft and B&N announced their partnership and the formation of a new corporation in 2012, under which the software giant invested $300 million for a 17.6 percent equity stake in the company, which was valued at $1.7 billion overall. While the companies did not on Thursday say the size of the stake Microsoft currently holds — shares could have been sold or transferred over the last two years that would modify equity percentages — the relatively small amount of cash that Nook Media is paying to get Microsoft out of the equation suggests that the company is not worth all that much.

The partnership between the companies was designed to help B&N offload some of its Nook business, namely its digital and college divisions within the Nook division, from its main operations. It also provided Microsoft an opportunity to break into what was then a major growth area in the industry and potentially profit from the partnership.

However, over the last two years, the Nook business has faltered and B&N has gotten out of the hardware business entirely, relying on a partnership with Samsung to offer new products. In an earnings report on Thursday, B&N revealed that its Nook business saw revenue fall 41.3 percent year over year to $63.9 million during its fiscal second quarter that ended November 1 . The division's operating loss stood at $37.6 million.

B&N said Thursday that it expects the separation to be complete by the end of August.

Neither Barnes & Noble nor Microsoft immediately responded to a request for comment on the announcement.

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